Seagate Slim Portable 500GB Hard Disk Drive Review

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When looking for a portable backup solution, there are certainly no shortage of products to fit your needs. If we look back at just a few of our reviews here at TweakTown, you will find products from Western Digital, ADATA, and Angelbird just to name a few. Today we look at one of Seagate's latest, the Slim Portable in the 500GB capacity.

The Slim Portable carries on Seagate's recent branding change, where we saw the Barracuda turn in the Desktop HDD and Momentus into Laptop HDD. Here we have what was once called FreeAgent turn into Slim Portable, all of this branding change allows end users to easily choose the drive they need, without the fuss of digging through marketing material to find out what they want and need. The Slim Portable carries a thin 10mm form factor with a weight of just 150 grams. At this time, a single capacity is offered at 500GB, with a two year warranty.

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Unpacking the Slim Portable, we found the drive to come with all documentation to get started. Additionally, we have the USB 3.0 cable and the drive itself.

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Our sample was delivered in the silver-brushed aluminium design. Seagate also offers this drive in black if that is your cup of tea.

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The backside of the drive offers model identification.

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Internally, Seagate has chosen to use the Momentus Thin hard disk drive.

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Instead of using a fully custom PCB, which we saw with product from WD, Seagate chose to use the ASMedia 1053, one of the best storage controllers on the market today.

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With the specifications for this drive claiming a weight of 150 grams, we just had to justify that claim. Surprisingly we found the drive weighs much less, only 123 grams.

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Like competing products, Seagate too has its very own backup software. To begin using the Seagate Dashboard, we selected the protect feature.

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Here we choose what types of files we want to backup, and clicked the checkmark to begin the procedure.

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Selecting the share feature from the main menu, you will find the option to upload media to Facebook, Flickr and YouTube.

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While software from competitors use existing cloud services like Dropbox, Seagate has chosen to manage its very own cloud service with the help of Nero.

To test external storage platforms, I utilize two of the most well-known and respected benchmark applications. ATTO Disk Benchmark is the first and is recognized as the industry standard for marketing specifications. Through DiskBench, we offer real-world testing as it offers a custom data set that can be controlled by the user. For our testing, I use a 10GB directory of mixed data that includes, pictures in both the RAW and JPEG file formats, AVCHD video and documents in both the XLS and DOC formats.

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The Seagate Slim Portable is formatted in the NTFS file system, carrying 465GB of useable capacity.

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In ATTO testing, we found the Slim Portable to reach 106 MB/s read, followed by 107 MB/s write.

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Above our chart reflects real-world file transfer testing. Here the Slim Portable came in just under 102 MB/s, right behind the Passport EDGE and quicker than competing products from ADATA.

The Seagate Slim Portable takes the concept of portable storage to highest level. Here we have a truly slim drive that offers no sacrifice in terms of performance. With the build quality at a top tier level, we find material such as brushed aluminium and durable plastics securing our drive.

Performance is on par with competing products and even higher in some respects. Our ATTO testing showed the drive capable of 107 MB/s in both read and write, making that system backup a ten minute job, rather than hours.

At the time of writing, I was able to find the Seagate Slim Portable for an astounding $59.99 at several online retailers, making this one of the most affordable backup solutions to date.

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